To be fair, gasoline cars that "just... catch fire" are older cars with poor maintenance. A 1-year-old car is not going to have leaking gas lines or oil leaks.
But comparing apples to apples, gasoline cars are not immune to catching fire after a collision either, and their gas tanks are much less protected than the Tesla's battery packs. Better statistics would compare cars 1-year-old or less to Teslas.
The point is that in advanced, well-run countries like Germany, the government (at different levels, this is about a city government) actually does this in an effective and sensible manner, which is why Munich was able to successfully switch to open-source software and save a lot of money. In crappy, corrupt countries like the USA, we get expensive debacles like the current Healthcare.gov disaster where big projects are given to political cronies and provided vastly inflated budgets, and disaster ensues.
The AC never said American companies had scruples either. He also gave no indication he's American. You do realize there's more than 2 countries on the planet with companies, right?
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware of specific policy that allowed Governments to ignore the shit out of their own founding documents or Amendments that exist to protect its citizens from this very abuse.
They don't need a specific policy, they can just do it, like they've been doing for many years now. What are you (or anyone else) going to do about it? Vote for the other party? The American public has been doing that for decades, and it hasn't changed anything.
Oh please, give it up. You've right, any child who's taken a decent civics class would know about the 4A, however the facts that the government has spent billions on spying apparatus and infrastructure, there's a whole federal agency dedicated to violating the 4A, the Executive branch has been complicit in it at all levels with both Republican and Democrat presidents, there's secret courts to rubberstamp all this activity, and Congress refuses to outlaw it, all shows that appealing to the Constitution and the rule of law is pointless. The law is whatever the government and the judiciary says it is, and they've said this stuff is perfectly legal, despite what your (and everyone else not in the government) interpretation of the 4A may say.
The idea that the government is bound by the Constitution and the BoR at this point is just silly.
Why would it not be possible for a C or C++ compiler to do the same thing? The multiple CPU thing could be a problem since C/C++-compiled code typically isn't targeted at a specific system, but it certainly could be specified, couldn't it? And for additional instruction sets, that's been common for ages; with gcc, it's always been possible to optimize for specific CPUs, not just i386. And with the multiple-CPU thing, isn't the OS supposed to handle scheduling of processes and threads automatically anyway, taking advantage of extra cores?
Is Slashdot really this full of complete morons and idiots? You're talking about low-voltage residential power lines, idiot, not high-voltage transmission lines. This place has really devolved into a den of morons over the years.
But why can't high-voltage lines be run underground?
Don't you think someone would have done it by now if it were feasible?
For a hint, go look at one sometime (or look up a photo of a HV tower). Look how much distance there is between the conductors. That much distance is needed to prevent arcing in the air between the conductors. Now, try to imagine the size of a tunnel that'd be needed to place those wires underground, with the same spacing between the wires, and also between the wires and the surrounding ground or tunnel walls. And no, coating the wires with an insulator isn't going to help much; air is already a pretty effective insulator; you could improve on it a little with something else, but not enough to make a huge difference in wire spacing (which is partly why they don't bother with insulation; it would add far too much expense for far too little improvement).
Finally, digging tunnels is really, really, really expensive. And tunnels can't cross fault lines; HV lines are used for longer distances, so this would be a real problem since when traversing long distances, you're bound to cross some fault lines.
So no, natural monopolies are NOT a myth at all. The road bit, which you admit, proves it all by itself.
How does that work out for high-voltage transmission lines? Or roads? It doesn't.
I'm surprised you libertarians haven't tried starting your own church yet; you already have a religion that makes about as much sense as Xenu and the Galactic Confederation and Teegeeack.
In places where rural electric coops already exist, then can certainly act for the good of all their customers (in the community) and redistribute stored energy, provide them energy (from the utilities they buy from) during dark periods, etc. What the previous poster was suggesting was creating new coops to directly compete with already-established utilities to do this. That won't work, for the reasons I stated: you can't have someone competing directly with a public utility monopoly. The rural coops only work for the reason you stated: the private companies didn't feel like running power lines, so someone set up a community-owned power company to do the same thing. In places where the private companies already have run power lines, you can't have someone else running more power lines parallel to theirs and competing with them. The local governments won't stand for it. The utility enjoys a monopoly because it's given that right by the government (at state and/or local levels), so that government isn't going to turn around and say that someone else (who's a non-profit, unlike the utility company) can now compete with them.
They don't have to worry about hundreds or thousands of mini-Snowden/Mannings popping up; it only takes one or two to cause a huge shitstorm, so they have to be very worried about that. However, there's not likely to be than many Snowden/Mannings either, because the risk is so insanely high. Manning was caught and is now in a military prison for a very long time, and Snowden evaded capture by the skin of his teeth, and is now stuck in crappy Russia trying to make a new life (after living in warm and beautiful Hawaii, I hope he likes snow and cold). Given the high risk of capture and imprisonment, there aren't likely to be very many people willing to try this in the future, however as I pointed out, it only takes one to cause an international incident.
Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".
Exactly. Teenages only rebel in small ways; they don't really think about things from a big-picture point-of-view. I remember going to middle school and high school in an upper-middle-class suburban area: all the kids at my schools were die-hard Republicans (this was back in the Reagan/GHWBush years, so this meant something slightly different back then). It wasn't until they went to college that many of them started changing their views radically.
In a libertarian's ideal world, you'll only have one road to your house (since obviously, there's only room for one; it's kinda hard to have two roads joining up at one driveway), and you'll simply have to pay a toll to whoever owns that road. And since you have no choice, you'll have to pay whatever toll that person or company wants you to pay. But libertarians don't see the problem with this.
That isn't possible here, because to share power among the members of the coop, you need electric transmission lines, and towers to hold them up, which means you need land, right-of-way, etc. You can only get that with the government's blessing, and they've already given that blessing to the local power utility monopoly. They're not going to give it to someone else, because the whole point of a utility monopoly is that you only need one set of infrastructure because it's infeasible to have dozens of sets of transmission lines running all over, so you give one company a monopoly for this, and have them regulated by the government so they don't go nuts with their monopoly. The government can't give other companies the same rights because then they'd be admitting they're doing a poor job in their capacity as regulators.
Maybe, but I doubt that's the case here: cats are attracted to spots where the dirt is soft and it's easy to dig and deposit their turds. It's the same reason that indoor cats will happily use a litter box instead of pooping all over your house. Potted plants and flower beds have nice, soft, diggable dirt, unlike most other places in someone's yard.
The solution is some kind of cat repellent. Some kind of pepper powder might work, and I'm sure there's other commercial purpose-made repellents available as well. I've seen some made more for deer and other animals; they'd probably work for cats too.
Sorry, no. I can understand why you might have that perception, but the fact here is that on this issue, the liberals and the extremist (economic) libertarians (the ones who think all the roads should be privatized, etc.) are in agreement, as well as the Republicans. How can this be? Simple: the liberals will defend any of Obama's actions or inactions, even when they're identical to something the Republicans would have done. So these days, liberals are big proponents of no-strings bailouts, bogus healthcare "reform" that only benefits insurance companies and was designed by a right-wing thinktank, warmongering, NSA spying on citizens, prosecuting marijuana crimes at the Federal level and busting medical marijuana dispensaries, etc. Heck, if Obama suddenly decided to round up homosexuals and put them in concentration camps, and ban contraception too, the liberals would be all for those things as well.
Don't bring up antifreeze; that's cruelty to animals and anyone who does that deserves to be poisoned themselves.
If you want to repel cats, there's lots of effective ways using natural materials, such as hot peppers. There was even a scene in Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman's character used this trick to deal with some bloodhounds chasing him.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, gasoline cars that "just... catch fire" are older cars with poor maintenance. A 1-year-old car is not going to have leaking gas lines or oil leaks.
But comparing apples to apples, gasoline cars are not immune to catching fire after a collision either, and their gas tanks are much less protected than the Tesla's battery packs. Better statistics would compare cars 1-year-old or less to Teslas.
The point is that in advanced, well-run countries like Germany, the government (at different levels, this is about a city government) actually does this in an effective and sensible manner, which is why Munich was able to successfully switch to open-source software and save a lot of money. In crappy, corrupt countries like the USA, we get expensive debacles like the current Healthcare.gov disaster where big projects are given to political cronies and provided vastly inflated budgets, and disaster ensues.
That's because you live in America, rather than an advanced, industrialized country with a well-run government.
Germany apparently isn't completely rife with corruption, unlike the United States. That's how.
The AC never said American companies had scruples either. He also gave no indication he's American. You do realize there's more than 2 countries on the planet with companies, right?
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware of specific policy that allowed Governments to ignore the shit out of their own founding documents or Amendments that exist to protect its citizens from this very abuse.
They don't need a specific policy, they can just do it, like they've been doing for many years now.
What are you (or anyone else) going to do about it? Vote for the other party? The American public has been doing that for decades, and it hasn't changed anything.
Oh please, give it up. You've right, any child who's taken a decent civics class would know about the 4A, however the facts that the government has spent billions on spying apparatus and infrastructure, there's a whole federal agency dedicated to violating the 4A, the Executive branch has been complicit in it at all levels with both Republican and Democrat presidents, there's secret courts to rubberstamp all this activity, and Congress refuses to outlaw it, all shows that appealing to the Constitution and the rule of law is pointless. The law is whatever the government and the judiciary says it is, and they've said this stuff is perfectly legal, despite what your (and everyone else not in the government) interpretation of the 4A may say.
The idea that the government is bound by the Constitution and the BoR at this point is just silly.
Why would it not be possible for a C or C++ compiler to do the same thing? The multiple CPU thing could be a problem since C/C++-compiled code typically isn't targeted at a specific system, but it certainly could be specified, couldn't it? And for additional instruction sets, that's been common for ages; with gcc, it's always been possible to optimize for specific CPUs, not just i386. And with the multiple-CPU thing, isn't the OS supposed to handle scheduling of processes and threads automatically anyway, taking advantage of extra cores?
Is Slashdot really this full of complete morons and idiots? You're talking about low-voltage residential power lines, idiot, not high-voltage transmission lines. This place has really devolved into a den of morons over the years.
You are a total moron. What do you think is going to prevent the wires from arcing when there's no insulator between them.
But why can't high-voltage lines be run underground?
Don't you think someone would have done it by now if it were feasible?
For a hint, go look at one sometime (or look up a photo of a HV tower). Look how much distance there is between the conductors. That much distance is needed to prevent arcing in the air between the conductors. Now, try to imagine the size of a tunnel that'd be needed to place those wires underground, with the same spacing between the wires, and also between the wires and the surrounding ground or tunnel walls. And no, coating the wires with an insulator isn't going to help much; air is already a pretty effective insulator; you could improve on it a little with something else, but not enough to make a huge difference in wire spacing (which is partly why they don't bother with insulation; it would add far too much expense for far too little improvement).
Finally, digging tunnels is really, really, really expensive. And tunnels can't cross fault lines; HV lines are used for longer distances, so this would be a real problem since when traversing long distances, you're bound to cross some fault lines.
So no, natural monopolies are NOT a myth at all. The road bit, which you admit, proves it all by itself.
How does that work out for high-voltage transmission lines? Or roads? It doesn't.
I'm surprised you libertarians haven't tried starting your own church yet; you already have a religion that makes about as much sense as Xenu and the Galactic Confederation and Teegeeack.
In places where rural electric coops already exist, then can certainly act for the good of all their customers (in the community) and redistribute stored energy, provide them energy (from the utilities they buy from) during dark periods, etc. What the previous poster was suggesting was creating new coops to directly compete with already-established utilities to do this. That won't work, for the reasons I stated: you can't have someone competing directly with a public utility monopoly. The rural coops only work for the reason you stated: the private companies didn't feel like running power lines, so someone set up a community-owned power company to do the same thing. In places where the private companies already have run power lines, you can't have someone else running more power lines parallel to theirs and competing with them. The local governments won't stand for it. The utility enjoys a monopoly because it's given that right by the government (at state and/or local levels), so that government isn't going to turn around and say that someone else (who's a non-profit, unlike the utility company) can now compete with them.
Considering how it treats homosexuals, I'd say it's a pretty crappy place.
The weather certainly isn't anything to get excited about either.
That's not a bad idea; that model works pretty well for the USPS. Utilities really shouldn't be for-profit entities.
That's a lot more than we can say about Slashdot.
They don't have to worry about hundreds or thousands of mini-Snowden/Mannings popping up; it only takes one or two to cause a huge shitstorm, so they have to be very worried about that. However, there's not likely to be than many Snowden/Mannings either, because the risk is so insanely high. Manning was caught and is now in a military prison for a very long time, and Snowden evaded capture by the skin of his teeth, and is now stuck in crappy Russia trying to make a new life (after living in warm and beautiful Hawaii, I hope he likes snow and cold). Given the high risk of capture and imprisonment, there aren't likely to be very many people willing to try this in the future, however as I pointed out, it only takes one to cause an international incident.
I wonder how history would have turned out differently had Guy Fawkes succeeded with his plot.
Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".
Exactly. Teenages only rebel in small ways; they don't really think about things from a big-picture point-of-view. I remember going to middle school and high school in an upper-middle-class suburban area: all the kids at my schools were die-hard Republicans (this was back in the Reagan/GHWBush years, so this meant something slightly different back then). It wasn't until they went to college that many of them started changing their views radically.
There are, but they aren't compatible with all the wacky macros that companies have built on top of MS Office.
In a libertarian's ideal world, you'll only have one road to your house (since obviously, there's only room for one; it's kinda hard to have two roads joining up at one driveway), and you'll simply have to pay a toll to whoever owns that road. And since you have no choice, you'll have to pay whatever toll that person or company wants you to pay. But libertarians don't see the problem with this.
That isn't possible here, because to share power among the members of the coop, you need electric transmission lines, and towers to hold them up, which means you need land, right-of-way, etc. You can only get that with the government's blessing, and they've already given that blessing to the local power utility monopoly. They're not going to give it to someone else, because the whole point of a utility monopoly is that you only need one set of infrastructure because it's infeasible to have dozens of sets of transmission lines running all over, so you give one company a monopoly for this, and have them regulated by the government so they don't go nuts with their monopoly. The government can't give other companies the same rights because then they'd be admitting they're doing a poor job in their capacity as regulators.
Maybe, but I doubt that's the case here: cats are attracted to spots where the dirt is soft and it's easy to dig and deposit their turds. It's the same reason that indoor cats will happily use a litter box instead of pooping all over your house. Potted plants and flower beds have nice, soft, diggable dirt, unlike most other places in someone's yard.
The solution is some kind of cat repellent. Some kind of pepper powder might work, and I'm sure there's other commercial purpose-made repellents available as well. I've seen some made more for deer and other animals; they'd probably work for cats too.
Sorry, no. I can understand why you might have that perception, but the fact here is that on this issue, the liberals and the extremist (economic) libertarians (the ones who think all the roads should be privatized, etc.) are in agreement, as well as the Republicans. How can this be? Simple: the liberals will defend any of Obama's actions or inactions, even when they're identical to something the Republicans would have done. So these days, liberals are big proponents of no-strings bailouts, bogus healthcare "reform" that only benefits insurance companies and was designed by a right-wing thinktank, warmongering, NSA spying on citizens, prosecuting marijuana crimes at the Federal level and busting medical marijuana dispensaries, etc. Heck, if Obama suddenly decided to round up homosexuals and put them in concentration camps, and ban contraception too, the liberals would be all for those things as well.
Don't bring up antifreeze; that's cruelty to animals and anyone who does that deserves to be poisoned themselves.
If you want to repel cats, there's lots of effective ways using natural materials, such as hot peppers. There was even a scene in Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman's character used this trick to deal with some bloodhounds chasing him.